The Western Sahara conflict has proven to be one of the most protracted and intractable struggles facing the international community. Pitting local nationalist determination against Moroccan territorial ambitions, the dispute is further complicated by regional tensions with Algeria and the geo-strategic concerns of major global players, including the United States, France, and the territory’s former colonial ruler, Spain. Since the early 1990s, the UN Security Council has failed to find a formula that will delicately balance these interests against Western Sahara’s long-denied right to a self-determination referendum as one of the last UN-recognized colonies. The widely-lauded first edition was the first book-length treatment of the issue in the previous two decades. Zunes and Mundy examined the origins, evolution, and resilience of the Western Sahara conflict, deploying a diverse array of sources and firsthand knowledge of the region gained from multiple research visits. Shifting geographical frames—local, regional, and international—provided for a robust analysis of the stakes involved. With the renewal of the armed conflict, continued diplomatic stalemate, growing waves of nonviolent resistance in the occupied territory, and the recent U.S. recognition of Morocco’s annexation, this new revised and expanded paperback edition brings us up-to-date on a long-forgotten conflict that is finally capturing the world’s attention.

This book, a concise examination of U.S. policy in contemporary Africa, delineates various aspects of the role that the U.S. played in exacerbating and/or resolving violent conflicts in postcolonial Africa and provides a succinct historical overview of these armed conflicts. F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam devotes considerable attention to four specific conflicts in Ethiopia-Somalia, the Western Sahara, Angola, and Rwanda and to the Clinton administration's African Crisis Response Initiative and its sequel under George W. Bush. The book concludes that lack of congruence between local forces in conflict in Africa, as well as U.S. aims in those conflicts, was only one of the constraints on the United States in its attempts at conflict resolution. America's counterproductive Cold War policies also defined relations with African states for far too long. Hence, the conflicts in postcolonial Africa became part of the legacy of those policies even as African problems continued to be low-priority concerns for the U.S. government. Libraries, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and professors of African studies, as well as the general reader, will find this book useful.

The official monthly record of United States foreign policy.